this is just a short blog post to point out that there are some new development resources available: Pentaho has added several sample plugins for PDI to the public CI-Server. If you ever wondered how to create your own plugins for PDI, check out the samples! . . . → Read More: Exploring the sample plugins for PDI

Most database systems provide a command-line based bulk loading utility that operates on flat files. These db-specific utilities are usually the fastest way to get data into a db system. This post shows a generic technique for using bulk loading utilities as part of a PDI ETL process. The download package has a working sample showing the . . . → Read More: Implementing Universal Bulk-Loading in PDI

In this post I would like to announce the release of the Edi2Xml PDI plugin. It will convert a string field with edifact data to an XML text, with one tag per segment, containing the fields and values as child tags. This makes the edifact data more accessible, as the XML can be queried using the . . . → Read More: Releasing Edi2Xml plugin for PDI

“PDI 4 Cookbook”, published June 2011, is a wonderful collection of tips, tricks, techniques and best practices regarding Kettle 4.x. It contains over 70 individual recipes that show how to solve common (and sometimes extraordinary) data processing tasks. This book is not about architecture diagrams, technology buzzwords and the philosophy behind Enterprise APIs. It is a . . . → Read More: Book Review: PDI 4 Cookbook by María Carina and Adrián Sergio

This article introduces clustering concepts supported by Kettle a.k.a. PDI. If you need to replicate data to several physical databases, or would like to learn about scale-out options for record processing, this article may be for you. As usual, the downloads section has the demo transformations for this article. . . . → Read More: Clustering in Kettle

This article introduces partitioning concepts supported by Kettle a.k.a. PDI. If you need to partition records over several tables, or would like to learn about increasing the parallelism of your transformations, this article may be for you. . . . → Read More: Partitioning in Kettle

This post shows the steps to get a customized CDE dashboard up and running on Pentaho BI Server. Starting from a mock-up sketch of a dashboard, this post shows the implementation steps all the way to the finished result, explaining CDE concepts as they appear along the way. CDE uses web technologies i.e. HTML/CSS/JS and SVG. . . . → Read More: Creating Dashboards with CDE

Pentaho Report Designer exposes the jFreeChart objects of charts to a post-processing script. This opens up some interesting possibilities. This post shows some techniques to dynamically change the appearance of a chart. All samples are available in the download package. Let’s play!

Maintaining consistent color coding for metrics on PRD charts can be a bit challenging, as chart colors are defined statically with no reference to a specific metric they belong to. This post shows how to maintain consistent relationships between colors and metrics in PRD charts using two different approaches. Get the sample reports from the downloads . . . → Read More: Color Coding and PRD Charts

Regular expressions are a very useful tool for a variety of string related tasks. In Kettle they are frequently used for extraction and manipulation tasks, as well as for specifying groups of file names. This post gives an introduction to regular expressions in general as well as some applications within Kettle a.k.a. PDI. Since the built-in . . . → Read More: An Introduction to Regular Expressions